"Intel is pleased to announce the BIOS Implementation Test Suite, a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you can use to override your BIOS's hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS."

The only thing worse than the BIOS is UEFI.
Yeah, I want big-content spyware (DRM et al) running _underneath_ my OS with full access to the network.

Here we find some common ground. UEFI scares me. That much power that close to the hardware is a very dangerous consideration.

The more standardized the interface the more simple it is to exploit.

That said, any UEFI implementation that I would care to use would provide me with full unfettered access to the ROM and would provide a hardware-based lock-out ( a jumper ). That way I could have the best of all worlds, an extremely powerful BIOS replacement, and the security of an immutable UEFI configuration.